Talking About Language, America, the Cold War, and Sherlock Holmes on a train in Austria and Switzerland

On the train from Vienna to Zurich, I sat at a table with Weiran and Matilda. 

Weiran is a professor of computer science at the University of Shanghai. He was graduate student in Dresden from 2013 to 2017, then a post doc at UC Davis near Sacramento from 2017 to 2021. 

Matilda is a retired teacher from Feldkirch, Austria. She and her husband taught English and other languages. Her husband taught Latin and Greek early in his career, then English and French when demand for classical language teachers disappeared.

When Matilda first sat with us in Salzburg, she and Weiran talked for a while in German. Then Matilda asked me a question in German. I responded with one of my few German phrases, which says I speak little German. They switched to English, and we talked together for the next two hours. Her question was whether we were sitting in a Quiet Car and were they talking too loudly. I said there was no Quiet Car as far as I knew.

Then we talked about Quiet Cars in America and Europe. Matilda thought it would be terrible, disrespectful to talk in a Quiet Car. I asked if they had been to America. Matilda never had. Weiran lived in California but never rode an Amtrak train. I said if they every rode an Amtrak train, the Quiet Car is not always quiet.

We talked more about travel. Matilda has been to the UK (She said England) many times, but never to America. She thought about it but each time she would travel to England instead. Soon after she retired, Trump was elected and that was the end of considering a trip to America. Matilda rolled her eyes and looked disgusted at the mention of Trump. Last year she spent a month at a monastery near Trondheim, Norway. She likes peaceful settings. From 5,000 miles away America looks like a world of noise and guns.

Weiran lived in California during most of the Trump administration and the first years of COVID and had no problems with either. He worried about the increasingly authoritarian government under President Xi and very much admired our Constitution and how the courts protected America from Trump. He thinks even if Trump gets back in power America will remain a free country.

We also talked a lot about languages: about teaching and learning and grammar and alphabets. Weiran explained the Chinese language and how he moves from one language to another. Matilda said she heard the music of Ancient Greek from her husband who taught the Greek poets singing them to his students.

Weiran told us how he expresses time in a language that does not have formal tenses. It was something like “Yesterday I drive…. tomorrow I drive…. I drive” for past, future, and present. I laughed and said that was how I spoke German 40 years ago. I used the present tense for everything. When I made the joke about speaking a little bit of bad German, I said I had lived in (West) Germany from 1976-79. Matilda said she had recently read a book about the Cold War. She had no idea how many Americans lived in Germany at the height of the Cold War in the 1970s and 80s. (A million). In western Austria near Switzerland, the Cold War seemed very remote.

After Matilda left the train, Weiran asked me about tanks. We talked about firing them and why they litter the battlefield in Ukraine, especially Russian tanks. Then as one does, we switched from talking tanks to Sherlock Holmes. We have both read all the Sherlock Holmes stories and started sharing pictures on our phones of our favorite video remakes of the drug-taking detective.

His favorite is the 1984 “Sherlock Holmes” starring Jeremy Brett. I told him about “Sherlock” starring Benedict Cumberbatch in which Dr. Watson is an Afghanistan War veteran from the recent war. The original Dr. Watson had served in the second British defeat in Afghanistan in the 1880s. I also mentioned “Elementary” in which Lucy Liu is Dr. Watson.

Weiran and I left the train in Zurich. He was staying the night then flying to Shanghai the next morning. I ran off to catch the train to Geneva. I had ten minutes between trains. Looking at America through the eyes of others is one of my favorite parts of traveling.

 

Ig Nobel Moment on a German Train

Brain activity in dead salmon

On the train from Utrecht to Frankfurt, I sat at a table with Max, a German man in his thirties on the way to Koln. He was wearing a t-shirt from a physics meeting. He runs a lab studying cardiac MRI techniques. He said they study the tiny magnetic fields that surround charge pulses within the heart. 

We talked for a while about his work. Then I asked if he had heard about the Ig Nobel Prizes. I mentioned that a physicist, Andre Geim, is the only person with a Nobel Prize and an Ig Nobel Prize. 

Max was aware of Geim and very aware of an Ig Nobel neuroscience Prize in 2012 won by a team that studied brain activity in dead salmon using fMRI. Max said the paper caused a big reaction in the MRI community because there were real problems with false readings. Here is the Ig Nobel follow up.

After a couple of minutes, Max took out his phone and showed me the fMRI images of brain activity in the now-famous dead salmon. He had the images on his phone. Dead salmon were reported as reacting to human faces. Dead salmon don’t react to human faces as it turns out. Here is the report on the Scicurious blog at Scientific American.

We shared the four-person table with a couple in their 20s who were playing cards with actual cards while the older people at the table were sharing pictures on their iPhones.

Escher Museum, The Hague

While I was in The Hague, capital of The Netherlands, I visited the M.C. Escher museum. His works are illusions within illusions. Here are several.

One of the rooms within the museum is an illusion itself with Escher work displayed inside a larger illusion.

 

Anxious people. A Novel. By Fredrik Backman.

 

I just finished Anxious People: A novel by Fredrik Backman. 

It is hilarious. Really. Actual Laugh Out Loud Hilarious.

Below is the first page and a half. If you like this, you will love the book. Enjoy!!!

A bank robbery. A hostage drama? A stairwell full of police officers on their way to storm an apartment. It was easy to get to this point. Much easier than you might think. All it took was one single really bad idea. 

This story is about a lot of things, but mostly about idiots. So, it needs saying from the outset that it's always very easy to declare that other people are idiots, but only if you forget how idiotically difficult being human is, especially if you have other people you're trying to be a reasonably good human for. Because there's such an unbelievable amount that we're all supposed to be able to cope with these days.  

You're supposed to have a job, somewhere to live and a family. And you're supposed to pay taxes and have clean underwear and remember the password to your damn Wi-Fi. Some of us never managed to get the chaos under control, so our lives simply carry on the world spinning through space at two million miles an hour while we bounce about on its surface like so many lost socks. Our hearts are bars of soap that we keep losing hold of. The moment we relax, they drift off and fall in love and get broken, all in the wink of an eye. We're not in control, so we learn to pretend. All the time, about our jobs and our marriages and our children and everything else, we pretend we're normal, that we're reasonably well educated, that we understand amortization levels and inflation rates, that we know how sex works. In truth, we know as much about sex as we do about USB leads. And it always takes us four tries to get the little USB in. (Wrong way round, wrong way round, wrong way round there. In.) We pretend to be good parents when all we really do is provide our kids with food and clothing and tell them off when they put when they put chewing gum they find on the ground in their mouths. We tried to keep tropical fish once and they all died, and we really don't know more about children than tropical fish, so the responsibility frightens the life out of us each morning. We don't have a plan, we just do our best to get through the day. Because there will be another one coming along tomorrow.  

Sometimes it hurts. It really hurts for no other reason than the fact that our skin doesn't feel like it's ours. Sometimes we panic because the bills need paying and we have to be grown-up and we don't know how because it's so horribly, desperately. Easy to fail at being grown up.  

Because everyone loves someone, and anyone who loves someone has had those desperate nights where we lie awake trying to figure out how we can afford to carry on being human beings. Sometimes that makes us do things that seem ridiculous in hindsight. But which felt like the other way. Like the only way out at the time? 

This Week I Joined the Red Rose Veterans Honor Guard

 

This week I joined the Red Rose Veterans Honor Guard. A veteran helicopter pilot I know suggested I join the group. The This Week Red Rose Veterans Honor Guard exists to make sure that all present and future honorably discharged Veterans are accorded a proper flag folding and live Taps Military Honors as requested by family members.

When I heard about the group, I thought now that I amwell past any sort of active service, I could be part of honoring fellow veterans of all branches of the military for their service at the end of their lives.  I will begin training with Red Rose Veterans Honor Guard later in the year after I return from my next trip.  

If you want to learn more about Red Rose Veterans Honor Guard, click here.

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Revisiting the Line Between Good and Evil

More than three decades ago, I read A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. This short book brought him out of obscurity. Soviet Premier Krushchev allowed the novel to be published. It quickly made its way around the world giving a bleak picture of the reality of Soviet Gulags.  

In the years that followed I read many of Solzhenitsyn's books including Gulag Archipelago and his novels about the revolution beginning with August 1914. Solzhenitsyn said, "The line between good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being." I agreed. Until I didn't. 

The rise of Trump, especially after Charlottesville in 2017, moved the line from inside my heart to to outside my heart. The line was between Us and Them: between people who wanted American democracy and the Christian Nationalists, White Supremacists and their ilk who would trash democracy to make a Handmaid's Tale theocracy. 

It took me a while to realize the line had moved. I wrote about it here.

For the last few months I have been reading about forgiveness and recovering form unforgivable acts with a group at the Hannah Arendt Center. Germany had to move on after the Nazi era. The Balkan nations had to exist within European culture after the slaughter in the 1990s, as did Rwanda after the genocide. Societies have to deal with horror and the threat of violence and continue as societies.

On a political level, I will do whatever is necessary (and legal) to defeat Trump and everyone who supports him. But someday Trump will be gone and life will go on. We will all have to find a way to make a society after the attempted insurrection and its aftermath.  

Masha Gessen Wins 2023 Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thinking

 

Masha Gessen at the annual conference of the 

Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College 

Activist and writer Masha Gessen has won the 2023 Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thinking. I heard Gessen speak at the Hannah Arendt Center and at the University of Pennsylvania. I read her articles in the New Yorker. She has been a leading dissident voice in Russia for almost two decades, barely escaping Russia after criticizing Vladimir Putin.  She has been warning the world about Putin at the risk of her life. The official announcement follows:

Following the win last year by the Ukrainian writer Serhiy Zhadan, the Hannah-Arendt Prize for Political Thinking in Germany today (August 4) has named journalist, author, translator, and activist Masha Gessen the winner of its 2023 Prize for Political Thought.
The formal presentation of the honor is set for December 15 in Bremen, and the award carries a purse of €10,000 (US$11,013), the accolade to be presented by the Hannah Arendt board, the Bremen senate, and board members of the Heinrich Böll Foundation. A round-table discussion with Gessen is scheduled for the following day, December 16, its focus to be “The Search for the State in Totalitarian and Autocratic Societies.”

In its announcement today, the program notes the sheer breadth of topical and thematic concern reflected in Gessen’s work, its rationale reading, “For years, Masha Gessen has been describing political tendencies and conflicts in American and Russian society.
“Gessen reports on power games and totalitarian tendencies as well as civil disobedience and the love of freedom. Masha Gessen writes about the arduous everyday life, cultural conflicts and the struggle for democratic self-determination.
“In a time characterized by autocratic erosion in the United States, war-ready totalitarianism in Russia, and serious conflicts between the great powers, understanding is becoming a civic duty. With books as well as essays in The New Yorker and a strong public presence, Gessen opens up new perspectives that help to understand a world in accelerated change.”